In the Depression-era southwestern United States, before propane stoves replaced Dutch ovens and cell phones supplanted signal fires, members of a scientific expedition risked their lives on the Colorado River in search of cactus specimens. U-M botanists Elzada Urseba Clover and Lois Jotter were the crew’s botanists — the first women in recorded history to raft through the Grand Canyon and make it out alive. Against the odds of their era, Clover and Jotter explored the frontiers of science, geography, and human endurance on their river adventure. They were prepared to die — but they were even more prepared to survive.
THREE SCIENTISTS STOOD OUTSIDE the Kraus
Natural Science Building at 4:30 P.M. on a June
afternoon, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues for perhaps the last time in their lives.
They planned to travel through the Grand Can-
yon by boat on the Colorado River, in an era when
their survival was a possibility, not an assurance.
This was 1938, and the threat of dismemberment,
disappearance, and death matched the pitch of general
excitement about exploration and adventure — not only for
this expedition, but for all. Just the previous summer, Amelia Earhart had vanished with her airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Most of the southwestern United States remained an unknown desert — the perfect place for an unassuming botanist from Michigan to risk her life conducting the first botanical survey of the Colorado River. Elzada Urseba Clover held a master’s (’32) and Ph.D. (’35)
in botany from the University of Michigan, finishing her
doctorate at 39 years old. Clover became assistant curator at
the U-M Botanical Gardens and taught botany at the University. Her great love was cacti, and she suspected that the Grand Canyon area contained plant specimens that the
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Botanical Gardens lacked. She didn’t know, of course, what kinds of plants grew there — no botanists did. Clover was particularly interested in how plant species were distributed across the Grand Canyon landscape. The few people who visited the region came for geological exploration or gold, not for plants. So when Clover bumped into a boatman who was eager to collaborate on a botanical expedition down the river, she
PHOTOS (Previous spread, left) Corbis; (previous spread, right) Cline Library/Northern Arizona University; (opposite) U-M Herbarium